By: Tony Scotti, President, Taylor Farms Illinois, Inc.
Taylor Farms is a $7 billion dollar plus company that is North America’s favorite maker of salads and healthy fresh foods. The corporate office is in Salinas, California and was founded in 1995 by Bruce Taylor, founder, and CEO. To this day Taylor Farms is still a privately held company that prides itself on family values and a simple business philosophy of 1) taking care of the customer, 20 taking care of one another, and 3) doing the right thing.
One of the strategies was to have a production facility within a 100-mile radius of all the major customers in the US, and that’s why we’re in Illinois,” says Tony Scotti, President, Taylor Farms Illinois, Inc. “The facility in Chicago is a prepared foods division with core competencies in raw protein cooking, hot food cooking and produce processing which feeds our assembly lines. We assemble a variety of salads, sandwiches, wraps, meals and other ready to eat products. If you go into a Starbucks today, all their grab and go items like sandwiches, salads, and parfaits are made by us in the Illinois and surrounding states. We work with many regional customers here within the Midwest. Some of our largest customers are Starbucks, Jewel, Meijer, Kroger / Home Chef, Trader Joe’s, and Amazon.
Taylor Farms contracts with specific farmers that follow strict food safety and quality regulations mandated by us, some of which are proprietary patented technologies. “Taylor is a vertically integrated company, owning and managing production from seed to shelf”, Casey Munn, Regional Sales Manager, says. “We harvest, process and bag leafy green salads. Nearly 80% of our business is private brand, so many times you won’t even know you’re eating a Taylor Farms salad.” 35% of the salads eaten in the US have been produced by a Taylor Farms facility.
Taylor Farms started serving food service outlets with processed bulk vegetables. They then expanded into grocery retail with a major offering of bagged salads and other produce product lines. The third segment of their business is a prepared foods division which is predominantly what we produce in our Chicago, Illinois location. “We’ve been here for 11 years,” Scotti says. “We currently have about 500 employees, most of which are from the Chicagoland area.”
Business has been tremendous for Taylor Farms, Illinois, especially as of late. “Our business has grown over 100% in the within the past two years,” Munn says. “We are challenged with the same issues everyone else has; freight barriers, supply chain, employee retention and increased overall costs. Our supplier based has faced many of the same demands which has made servicing our customers that much more difficult. Taylor Farms, Illinois has been able to creatively come up with win / win solutions for our customers. This has resulted in a 97% fill rate in the past several months even with the challenges mentioned above.”
Taylor Farms, Illinois continues to develop new products and has recently invested in producing round bowl salads. “They are individually served healthy and nutritious salads for consumers who are time starved looking for convenient grab and go meal solutions,” Scotti says. “It’s a 5-to-7-ounce salad and is affordable and of very high quality and value. It has fresh cut produce, a lot of the proteins which are never frozen with clean ingredients.”
“Another high selling product is producing ready to eat hot meals that just need to be microwaved,” Scotti says. “It’s an entire meal with a protein, a starch, and a vegetable. In our Chicago location, we cook from scratch, including grilled and baked chicken, pastas, meatballs, meatloaf, quiche, and lasagna. We also make our own sauces and other ingredients that go into the final product, which makes us unique when developing products for our customers. We can pick and pack specifically to a store or we can make a kit with all those products included that we send to the retailers. They can put them together and add any additional ingredients at their stores.”
Taylor Farms has a full staff currently, and they credit the company culture for that success. “This is a great organization to work for,” Scotti said. “When you’re working for a $7 billion company, that treats employees like a family, you really have the best of both worlds.
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